Mislaid, Nell Zink
Mislaid, Nell Zink
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Mislaid
A Novel

Author: Nell Zink

Narrator: Cassandra Campbell

Unabridged: 8 hr 13 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/19/2015


Synopsis

A sharply observed, mordantly funny, and startlingly original debut from an exciting, unconventional new voice, about the making and unmaking of the American family that lays bare all of our assumptions about race and racism, sexuality and desire.

Stillwater College in Virginia, 1966. Freshman Peggy, an ingénue with literary pretensions, falls under the spell of Lee, a blue-blooded poet and professor, and they begin an ill-advised affair that results in an unplanned pregnancy and marriage. The couple are mismatched from the start--she's a lesbian, he's gay--but it takes a decade of emotional erosion before Peggy runs off with their three-year-old daughter, leaving their nine-year-old son behind.

Worried that Lee will never have her committed for her erratic behavior, Peggy goes underground, adopting an African American persona for her and her daughter. They squat in a house in an African American settlement, eventually moving into a housing project where no one questions their true racial identities. As Peggy and Lee's children grow up, they must contend with diverse emotional issues: Byrdie must deal with his father's compulsive honesty; while Karen struggles with her mother's lies--she know nether her real age, nor that she is “white,” nor that she has any other family.

Years later, a minority scholarship lands Karen at the University of Virginia, where Byrdie is in his senior year. Eventually the long lost siblings will meet, setting off a series of misunderstanding and culminating in a comedic finale worthy of Shakespeare.

About Nell Zink

Nell Zink grew up in rural Virginia. She has worked in a variety of trades, including masonry and technical writing. In the early 1990s, she edited an indie rock fanzine. Her books include The Wallcreeper, Mislaid, Private Novelist, and Nicotine, and her writing has appeared in n+1, Granta, and Harper’s. She lives near Berlin, Germany.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Always on May 21, 2017

I really enjoyed the writing in this book and the plot line was interesting but I think that Zink really lost out by transitioning to the future where Karen and Temple end up at university and she just so happens to run into Byrdie. I was enjoying the book when it was just about Peggy trying to figu......more

Goodreads review by Roxane on July 05, 2015

This novel is so smart, almost too smart for it's own good. There are times when it is clear the writer is simply enamored with her wit, to hell with anything else. But oh this is a damn fine read. So much to chew on. True absurdist comedy. The race stuff is a bit off kilter but not distressingly so......more

Goodreads review by Issicratea on August 29, 2015

Nell Zink has been the recipient of an extraordinary amount of media hype recently, some of it quite fawning. From the reviews, opening her second novel, Mislaid, you would expect something eccentrically brilliant, witty, challenging, subversive. I didn’t feel it lived up to those expectations at al......more

Goodreads review by Ron on May 12, 2015

“Mislaid,” indeed. The title of Nell Zink’s new novel is just the first wry, indecorous joke in this zany-brainy story about a teenage lesbian who sleeps with a gay man. Zink writes with such faux innocence that her subversive cracks about sexuality and race detonate only after she has riffed off to......more

Goodreads review by lucky little cat on September 04, 2019

Eh, Nell Zink's making southern gothic a little gothicker. A smothered, eclipsed child-wife of an alcoholic, closetedHoly shades ofCat on a Hot Tin Roof,Batman professor-poet would be commonplace as a southern gothic heroine. So Zink makes her heroine a lesbian creative writing student whose career......more